“Can we please stop asking women to modify their behaviours in public spaces and start asking men to stop perpetrating violence against women?”

We aren’t asking men to not be violent to women? Golly who knew???

Sure lots more needs to be done in the area but, in the meantime since no final solution to the problem has yet been achieved, to suggest sensible precautions on the part of women may not be such a bad idea. But pop your head up over the sex wars parapet and mention that and you’ll be shot down in flames to cries of ‘victim blaming’.

It is doing our young women a disservice to encourage them to believe that, just because you have a right to something, that right is guaranteed at all times and in all places. Violation of human rights is pretty damn common on the planet at the moment. Children are being ripped off their parents and incarcerated FFS. Refugees are being kept in indefinite detention, community water supplies are being polluted by big business with seeming impunity….

Gillian Meagher was offered an escort home on the night she was murdered, and refused it, understandably believing herself to be safe – she lived a short walk away – Melbourne is generally a safe and friendly city – why wouldn’t she feel okay to walk home alone at night? And wasn’t it her right?

In a mobile call just before she was attacked Eurydice Dixon indicated she was uneasy and would be relieved to get home, but tragically her right to walk home unafraid at night did not protect her.

Being reminded of the possibility that even in an open friendly city like Melbourne the possibility of attack exists and being shown ways to avoid attack or protect oneself during an attack seems more useful than cries of “It is the attackers fault, you die blameless!”

Mobile phones give a false sense of security, they may record but, currently, do not protect. We need to be advising women how to properly protect themselves, not telling them ‘you shouldn’t have to’.

Of course they shouldn’t have to! But to treat women as if they have no responsibility to take precautions for their own safety, to decry the police for reminding women of the need to take care is to infantilise women, as if they are a special category whose rights should be guaranteed at all times and in all places without any effort or awareness on their part outside of screaming, two-year-old-style “I have my rights” over and over again on social media and attacking those who have the sometimes unenviable task of protecting those rights.

Male violence against women exists, it has done for a long time. As a society we are only beginning to address it’s causes and attempt meaningful remedies. In the meantime lets stop sacrificing ‘what is’ on the altar of the ‘what should’. And let’s stop shooting the messenger.

This is slightly edited version of an article I wrote in response to a long interview with former sannyasin Jane Stork in The Age Magazine in 2009. The Age ignored it and it appeared on the SannyasWiki website. In light of recent renewed public interest in Osho I thought it could do with another airing.

In your article entitled Escaping the Bhagwan, April 11, 2009, Jane Stork freely admits to having engaged in a conspiracy to murder Oregon District Attorney Charles Turner and to attacking Osho’s Doctor with an adrenalin-loaded syringe. Surely this begs the question “Who had the lucky escape?” To the residents of Rajneeshpuram dancing in the streets in celebration of the departure of Sheela Silverman and her group, of which Jane Stork was a member, there was, I imagine no question about that.

For clarity let me mention at this stage that his disciples stopped using the honorific “Bhagwan” many years ago and he has since been known simply as Osho. It has never been grammatically correct to call him “the” Bhagwan – a point the Australian Press has persisted in ignoring for years.

But let’s get back to Ms Stork and her escape. If we are to go along with the conceit that it was Stork who had the lucky escape I can only suggest that considering all this happened 33 years ago it is a moot point whether she has in fact escaped at all. I was involved, as were many of my friends, in the same commune as Jane Stork and the events she has obsessed about for so long were for most of us simply grist for the mill – we saw what had resulted from our own unconsciousness and irresponsibility, learned from it, and moved on.

Of course moving on might have been harder for me too had I been naïve enough to get sucked into Sheela’s nefarious activities. The scale of the audience would have been much larger for a start and the temptation to save face by blaming someone else would have been correspondingly greater. Osho was adept at facilitating the airing of our dirty linen in public and there are on record many instances of his closest disciples having their “trips blown” in public discourse. Most considered it a privilege. Some missed. But, after all, that is why we were all there.

Stork says in the article “To come to terms with that much self-delusion is really difficult, it’s a long, slow, painful process.” I suggest that if she’d had the integrity to take responsibility for her actions at the time she would not have had to spend so many years constructing a justification for them and could have moved on long ago. Her lack of a sense of responsibility is glaring in light of the emphasis Osho places on responsibility for oneself. Wasn’t she listening? Or maybe the question should be: Who was she listening to?

But before we decide whether Stork is any kind of credible witness, let’s ask ourselves: What kind of woman is she? That is, apart from being a self-confessed attempted murderer and criminal conspirator. Does she deserve the full-colour treatment afforded her by The Age? In these difficult times does she have a message of hope to share with her fellow human beings? Does her extraordinary intellect warrant her being interviewed widely on radio and television including Channel 7’s Sunrise breakfast show, the ABC and A Current Affair?

A Current Affair? Really? Sounds like more of the same old same old affair to me. Is this woman unable to get a job or something that she needs to squeeze this dry old lemon yet again?

“Stork was introduced to the Bhagwan’s teachings through a psychologist she was seeing because of personal and marital problems. “I didn’t even notice that (the psychologist) was wearing a long orange robe and had a string of beads around his neck.”

Is she blind or is she actually being disingenuous in saying that she didn’t notice that this psychologist she consulted in the Public Health Department was wearing a long orange robe and a string of beads around his neck?”

I consulted the same psychologist around the same time, knowing about the beads in advance, so I can vouch for the fact that his orange robe was orange in the orangest possible sense of the word and that he was also sporting far more than the normal complement of hair, both facial and cranial, for public servants of the time. No way could this extraordinary get-up be simply overlooked – that was part of the point for heaven’s sake. So why would Stork make this claim? Is she trying to make out that the psychologist in question was sneakily infiltrating the public health system in search of naïve housewives for his sex cult?

Giving Stork the benefit of the doubt, I am prepared to accept her claim of blindness and naivety, it being my own direct experience that Sheela had no time for intelligent, on-the-ball-people. However, Stork’s stance as an expert on all things connected to the commune strikes a discordant note when coupled with such blindness. Either she’s as dumb as she makes out or she’s not. She can’t have it both ways.

Interesting that the personal and marital problems that Stork was experiencing in WA before going to Poona neatly morph into deliberate moves to fragment families and drive a wedge between husbands and wives, parents and children. Suddenly it’s someone else’s fault and Jane is the victim.

Another interesting thing is that Stork seems to think everyone else was as blinkered as she was. She suggests that because the Rolls Royces were transported to the commune in covered transports (and why not at that price?), that somehow it was a secret, that no one was supposed to know about them or notice their existence? I saw twenty-five of them in a row one day – they were hard to miss and very impressive. Osho also talked about them frequently in discourse and I remember wondering at the time whether he might not even be exaggerating their number, especially when I met the guy whose job it was to re-spray them on a regular basis. I was wrong as it turns out, there was over ninety.

It is a matter of public record that Osho didn’t actually own the Rolls Royces. They were the property of the Rajneesh Modern Car Trust and were, I believe, the only asset to have appreciated in value when the ranch folded. Thousands of acres of land reclaimed from decades of degradation were not considered to be worth much in Oregon at the time.

“Things began to unravel in 1985 when Kylie was sexually abused on the commune. At the time Stork believed the allegations were lies perpetrated by the enemies of the Bhagwan. ‘I just dismissed it as these people out there, they’re just against us and trying to mess us up’ she says.”

Stork’s fourteen year-old daughter’s affair with an older man was public knowledge in Rajneeshpuram. The couple made no effort to conceal it and it was generally accepted as unremarkable. For Stork to say she didn’t know what was going on beggars belief. My guess is that she thought nothing of it until it came time to find material for her reconstruction of a new “Jane Stork innocent victim”. Jane has moved back into a culture that has very strong opinions about 14 year-olds and their sex lives so now a love affair becomes sexual abuse. Once again Jane is thinking what she’s told to think.

“Stork says it is wrong to describe her as the victim of brainwashing by a purely evil cult. ‘I think I brainwashed myself,’ she says.”

Aha! A glimmer of light has pierced the fog but then Stork immediately does a back-flip blaming Osho in an egregious misreading of his message: “The Bhagwan had one line: the good disciple follows what the master says, the good disciple doesn’t think.” Makes me wonder if we are talking about the same man. How did she manage to overlook the following?

How could he (Hitler) rule so many intelligent people so easily, with such foolish ideas? These people were trained to believe; these people were trained not to be individuals. These people were trained always to remain in discipline. These people were trained that obedience is the greatest virtue. It is not! Sometimes it is disobedience which is the greatest virtue. Sometimes, of course, it is obedience. But the choice has to be yours: you have consciously to choose whether to obey or not to obey. That means you have consciously to remain the master in every situation, whether you obey or you disobey. Osho: A Sudden Clash of Thunder (1977)

Did she not listen? These ideas are not one-offs; they are the major part of what Osho was on about. And I know because I did listen.

The article in the Age article describes Stalk’s real guru, the power crazed Sheela Silverman as “the Bhagwan’s puppet and scapegoat, and ultimately his fall-woman.”

Fall-woman for what? Scapegoat for what? – It was not Osho who conspired to murder the District Attorney, or had salmonella sprinkled over salad bars in a nearby town in order to influence the result of a local election. It was not Osho who attempted to murder his own doctor or his care-giver. It was not Osho who engaged in wholesale tapping of commune residents’ phones.

This pretty scary puppet, Sheela, can be seen on YouTube, flipping back and forth between professing devotion to Osho and painting him as some sort of brain-washing monster in an ongoing, obsessive, attempt at self-justification.

In the end I am left with a feeling of sadness and something of pity for these women, especially when I read the following remark of Stork’s:

“But I’m sure he didn’t give a stuff about doing good and helping people,” she says. “He didn’t care at all for his people. They were just a nuisance, they were part of the show.”

It makes me sad that somehow Jane Stork managed to miss the experience I shared with so many beautiful friends. Either she was so blind she did not see and feel it in the first place or her own need to save face forces her to deny the experience now.

My own experience of Osho transformed my life and I am overwhelmed with gratitude.

The painting consists of a nest containing an egg down in the left hand corner,
A long necked white bird flies up towards the right. Centrally placed at the top of the painting there is a patch of light and to the right a couple of slanting white lines

Compositionally the painting is anchored by the nest and the egg. (Eggs are a recurring theme in Whiteley’s work.) Most of the objects occur in the bottom third of the canvas with the exception of the escaping bird. Long twig like branches, unmistakably eucalypt, form part of the nest and then continue off the edges of the canvas. This creates a flow from near the top left hand side of the canvas to the bottom right.

Around the nest is the effect of water, of the reflection of things outside the painting and the presence of submerged items within.
A clear influence is traditional Asian painting:

I feel like a white Asian … I wish now that my Dad had given me an Asian brush when I was eight, instead of a European sable. (1)

Whiteley’s relaxed mastery of technique allows him to play with spatial concerns in an almost surrealist way without distorting the decorative beauty of the work.
An important part of the effect of the painting consists of the subversion of the spatial relationships on the canvas which occurs as a result of:

• the disproportion in size between the bird and the nest creating a kinesthetic tension.

• the combined effect of the birds eye view of the nest and egg with the reflective qualities and depth of the water leading to similar visual ambiguity and kinesthetic tension.

• the ambiguity between water and sky. The entire surface of the canvas could be water but there is the disturbing presence of the two white lines at the top right hand side. Meteorites? Or two of those little insects that shoot across the surface of ponds? And is the light at the top of the canvas the sun coming through clouds or its reflection on pond scum? The texture of the paint in the centre of the canvas creates a sense of space that adds to the ambiguity.

These ambiguities, subtle but powerful boundary rattlers provoke a surrender to the painting independent of external reference. This immersion in the experience for its own sake, enables a powerful experience of transcendence in the viewer.

My first experience of such art-mediated transcendence was at an exhibition of Whiteley’s paintings, some years ago at an NGV exhibition. It was the first time I ever got up close and personal with a Whiteley.

I started off admiring his skill as a draftsman in the small early works, and, being a bit of a conservative as far as art is concerned, found myself both impressed and relieved to discover that he was a seriously accomplished draftsman.

And then the explosion.

Everything stopped.

No gallery, no crowd, and above all no me.

Only Beach. Sun saturated beachfullness. This.

I can’t identify exactly which of Whitely’s works it was that produced this powerful effect, It may even have been quite different from the image I retain in my mind’s eye, but I will never forget the flavour of it.